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Catholics and Contraception: Boston, 1965

By Seth Meehan March 15, 2012 9:17 pmMarch 15, 2012 9:17 pm

Michael Dukakis does not mince words. He admits to being “flabbergasted” by the debate between the Catholic hierarchy and the Obama administration over the mandate that requires employers to provide contraception coverage. “I thought birth control wasn’t an issue anymore,” he told me.

I reached out to Dukakis for historical perspective on the escalating birth control controversy— which, he laments, now involves Greek Orthodox as well as Catholic leaders. Nearly 50 years ago, as a state representative from Brookline, Mass., Dukakis was part of a compromise between opponents and proponents of contraception, a compromise that involved coordination between Planned Parenthood and the church that would be unthinkable now. Dukakis remains convinced that contraception became legal in Massachusetts only with the assistance of the local Catholic leadership.

Cardinals today do not enjoy the same secular power Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing did in the 1960s. But following Wednesday’s decision by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to continue its “vigorous opposition to this unjust and illegal mandate,” the Catholic hierarchy will wield its influence nonetheless. And while the current debate unfolds, the Catholic voice that will matter the most will be that of Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York — the country’s newest cardinal and the president of the U.S.C.C.B.

In the 1960s, it was Cushing who took center stage in a prominent public debate over access to contraception. He faced a different political and legal reality from that of Dolan and his fellow bishops. Yet, according to Dukakis, Cushing’s conduct at the time was a “great act of statesmanship.”

Associated PressRichard Cushing of Boston in 1958.

The issue in the spring of 1965 was whether — not how — one could gain access to birth control. But Cushing’s actions still offer a precedent for cooperation and compromise. Two states had very strong anti-contraception laws on the books in 1965. The Supreme Court was considering the constitutionality of Connecticut’s all-out ban on the use of contraception. In Massachusetts, a state legislative panel was holding an open hearing on a proposal submitted by State Representative Dukakis, a politically ambitious lawyer who had been in office for three years, to remove an 86-year-old bar to the distribution of birth control devices and information.

It was not the first time in Massachusetts a repeal of the ban had been considered. In 1948, Cushing, then an archbishop, led a public charge against Referendum No. 4, a statewide ballot measure designed to relax the ban on contraception. From the pulpit and on the radio, the Catholic campaign argued that birth control was “still against God’s law.” Cushing defined contraception at the time as “anti-social and anti-patriotic, as well as absolutely immoral.” The campaign was a bitter one. In the end, 57 percent of voters rejected the referendum.

Cushing had won, but victory came at a cost. “Deployment of the Church’s political muscle,” the historian Leslie Tentler argues, offended non-Catholics in and out of the commonwealth. Four years later, the toll hit home as Cushing confided to a friend, “I hate to think of going through another battle.”

It was not until the 1960s that reformers next attempted to amend the state’s birth control restrictions. Even then, Dukakis recalls, “the memory of the ’48 battle was fresh in our minds.” That seems to have been also true for Cushing (now a cardinal). He clearly had a change of heart on the appropriateness of laws like the state’s birth control restrictions, which sought to impose moral behavior at odds with individual conscience. More generally, he had adopted a conciliatory tone. Two days before a fellow Massachusetts Catholic won the first primary of the 1960 presidential campaign, Cushing argued that a Christian must engage in “friendly discussion with those whose views of life and its meaning are different than his own.” The times had changed, and so had he.

In 1963, while a guest on WEEI radio, Cushing took a question from an unidentified female caller who asked if he considered the birth control ban to be “bad law.” Yes, Cushing replied. “I have no right to impose my thinking, which is rooted in religious thought, on those who do not think as I do.” (The anonymous caller, I discovered decades later, was Hazel Sagoff, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts. A month earlier she had learned from a Cushing confidant that support for the state’s ban was dwindling within the local church hierarchy.) It was the first time that the cardinal publicly announced a willingness to accept revisions to the state’s contraception law.

Poor health prevented Cushing from appearing before the legislative panel considering the Dukakis bill in March 1965, but he dominated the hearing nonetheless. In a written statement he declared that “Catholics do not need the support of civil law to be faithful to their own religious convictions and they do not seek to impose by law their moral views on others of society.” He found it unreasonable to “forbid in civil law a practice that can be considered a matter of private morality.” What’s more, he observed, laws needed a “reasonable correspondence” to community standards to be effective and enforceable. Cushing, however, could not endorse the proposed change to the ban, because he felt that it lacked “proper safeguards” for the young. He requested that Gov. John Volpe appoint a commission to craft a repeal to “satisfy the conscientious opinions of the whole community.”

“Cardinal Relaxes Anti-Birth Law Stand” read the Boston Globe’s banner headline, while an editorial noted that because of Cushing’s new position the birth control issue was “no longer a rancorous controversy.” Volpe appointed a 21-member committee to draft a revised bill on the same day, as it happened, that the Supreme Court invalidated Connecticut’s ban on the use of birth control. The new bill met Cushing’s concerns about the young by prohibiting pharmacists from furnishing contraception to those who had not “attained age 21” or lacked a doctor’s prescription. Importantly, however, the cardinal chose not to speak out either in favor of or against the revisions.

Cushing’s silence proved fatal to the reform. Planned Parenthood’s Sagoff had predicted as much to a local rabbi, a Planned Parenthood ally, earlier that year.“Catholic politicians, and even non-Catholics with Catholic constituencies, will vote against the amendment,” she said, unless they hear “that the cardinal wants them to vote for it.” She was right. House members emphatically rejected the compromise in August. One Democratic representative said the “damnable, dirty legislation” was “an attempt to change God’s law.” Another — a fellow Democrat and a father of 15 — declared that the existing law “was put on the books by God-fearing people and was kept there by God-fearing people.” He justified the House’s vote by pointing to Cushing’s failure to publicly approve the bill.

Why did the cardinal remain silent? Certainly, he had privately endorsed the repeal effort following his WEEI statement in 1963. With his blessing, a series of meetings had quietly taken place between lay and clerical Catholics and associates of Planned Parenthood to draft a blueprint for repealing the ban through the Legislature. The blueprint appeared as an essay by a young Catholic doctor, Joseph Dorsey, in the Oct. 15, 1964, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. It acknowledged “the need in a pluralistic society for a consensus on a moral principle before it can be expressed as a civil law.” Cushing, among others, read and approved the article prior to publication. A close confidant of the cardinal wrote a foreword calling the article a “balanced and thoughtful review of a topic that has a history of complexity and bitterness.”

Cushing’s silence in the summer of 1965 is best explained by his expectation that the Second Vatican Council, nearing its end, would soon release a long-anticipated statement recognizing that individuals may not be coerced to act against their conscience. Local church officials believed this statement would give the repeal effort in Massachusetts the cover of Vatican acceptability. That support came four months later, on Dec. 7, 1965, when Pope Paul VI promulgated the Declaration on Religious Freedom.

When a bill that would allow physicians to prescribe birth control to “any married person” was introduced in the next legislative session — a bill otherwise similar to the one House members had rejected 119–97 the year before — Cushing endorsed it publicly by praising its “safeguards” while reaffirming his position that Catholics did “not seek to impose by law their moral view on other members of society.” This time the bill passed, 136–80. The Senate followed suit, and Volpe signed the amendment to the state’s General Laws on “Crimes against Chastity, Morality, Decency, and Good Order.”

Wednesday’s announcement by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops came in the middle of New York’s “Timothy Cardinal Dolan Week,” proclaimed to recognize, in part, that Dolan will have a “tremendous impact on the next generation of Catholicism in New York and throughout the United States.” His organization pledged to continue its public fight against the insurance mandate’s threat of “unprecedented magnitude” to individual conscience. The Bishops promised “vigorous efforts” in education, public advocacy, and legislative lobbying and by seeking “relief from the courts,” a route explicitly avoided by Massachusetts reformers in the 1960s. The announcement — which criticized the Obama administration’s “unspecified and dubious” plan and its “grave consequences,” warning that others’ “cherished beliefs may be next on the block” — echoes the foreboding tone and language from Cushing’s bitter campaign against the 1948 reform rather than that of the 1960s effort toward reconciliation.

Ultimately, Cushing faced a difficult decision. The solution was not perfect (the Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that limiting contraception to married couples was unconstitutional), but the process was relatively free of acrimony. The cardinal understood that while a debate about morality could not be free of “disagreement and dissension” there could still be “agreement and consensus.” On the level of agreement and consensus between 1963 and 1966, Cushing had a greater say than most. A great act of statesmanship requires a willing partner, but Cushing’s conciliatory tone made compromise between unlikely allies possible.

Seth Meehan is a Clough Center Graduate Fellow at Boston College. He is the author of “From Patriotism to Pluralism: How Catholics Initiated the Repeal of Birth Control Restrictions in Massachusetts,” which appeared in the Catholic Historical Review in 2010.

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